Illustrations from "The Bird Princess," "Jeremiah, Catch the Devil," and "The Werewolf of Borschev."
The stories that make up "Tales the Wind Told" were written to be read aloud. At the end of each story is a link to download a free printable PDF version. The tales are dedicated to the reader, whose understanding of drama and voice will lend life to the characters; to the listener, who may remember the story and the circumstances of the reading many years down the road; and to the characters themselves, who have become my friends.
-- Brooks Mencher
Some say a huge stone with a tail of fire fell from the sky with the roar of a great, mad beast and burst into a thousand pieces of flint at the foot of the old tree that grew at the edge of the village of Mielnisha.
Others said it was ball lightning that had formed high in the blistering summer sky, higher than the feathered clouds, and it was cast like a millstone to the Earth and to the village and to the tree at the edge of Mielnisha.It is easy to imagine a fearsome leopard, as black as night, prowling through his forest. But what does a water spirit look like? According to the inhabitants of the cobbled, cathedraled city, you cannot see spirits. Spirits are invisible, they would say. In contrast, the people who live in First Village would say that spirits are clearly visible and may look like lights or stars, or like small people with odd features.
It begins at the threshold of a decrepit cottage that has been made by hand from bark and saplings glued together with a mortar of sour river mud, half-rotted straw and pebbles of tar mashed together into a dark gray, fetid dough. This was the home, if it could be called that, of Mokbarak, the werewolf.
High above, the sun worked its crippled way to the west, and all who lived on the Earth below were dizzy from its jumping light and shadows. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of its path across the sky, the sun fell from the heavens and its light was extinguished. A great darkness fell without a sound. With the fall of the sun, the vibrating shadows became still, and the sadness and fear of humans and beasts did nothing but grow, for no one knew if they would ever see light again.
There is a ballad that was once complete and beautiful, but which now exists only in fragments, like small and incomplete memories or scraps of fallen dreams that a person might pick up from the floor near the bedside at the first dim light of day.
The song itself, the written words of it, were said to have washed up on the banks of East River a very long time ago, the words written on birch bark, as if the river itself had, after an eon of consideration, decided to give up one of its songs, sat down, and with an ear on the melody, revealed the rhymes in a graceful, flowing script.The wind, amid all its mysterious meanderings above the Earth, one day blew a scrap of paper from the old village of Hyram Miel high into the air, up over the river and into the nearby forest. There, it settled like a wind-blown leaf and like a drifting flower petal at the base of an orange wood lily - - and at the feet of a small person who lived in the forest.
The feet belonged Snorri Sturlesson, a gnome who had lived for many, many years deep in the wood and never ventured beyond its rocks and creeks and meadows. He tended the flowers and trees, and he herded small animals like moles and rabbits from vale to glen or from meadow to meadow depending on his mood and the inclinations of his day. There was no animal who was not his friend and no flower that ignored his happy company.
Each year the natural forces of the Earth meet and decide how and when the leaves will fall in autumn. The council members include the spirits of the wind and mountains, moon and sun, and the animals who watch the seasons turn -- badger, frog, mouse and wren. This play is appropriate for grade-school actors, or adult actors for a young audience.